


For Whom We Bleed

by musamihi



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Anal Fingering, Angst, Established Relationship, Hosnian Prime, Hurt/Comfort, Minor Injuries, Multi, Oral Sex, Reunions, Separations, Vaginal Fingering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-04
Updated: 2017-05-04
Packaged: 2018-10-25 00:57:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10753374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musamihi/pseuds/musamihi
Summary: Karé, Iolo, and Poe can't always be together - but they always have Hosnian Prime.  Until they don't.





	For Whom We Bleed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [celeste9](https://archiveofourown.org/users/celeste9/gifts).



_New Republic Defense Fleet Base ; Hosnian Prime ; 28 ABY._

Iolo fumbled with the flimsy plastic catches on the medkit. He was drunk. But he was less drunk than the rest of them, which made him adopt a certain air of exasperated gravity - and when the medkit finally cracked open and tottered over onto its side, spilling out a slide of individually wrapped bandages, he glared down at it as though it, too, had just stumbled into his room reeking of alcohol, far too early in the morning.

"It's just a bruise," Poe said, too loud and too cheerful, watching bandages futter to the floor with a polite interest more appropriate to a nature docuholo. He was sitting unnaturally straight in one of the three chairs surrounding Iolo's tiny table, and the part of his face that wasn't obscured by the giant freezepac he was pressing to his eye was studiously, pleasantly attentive, the feeble mask of a man trying to convince himself and everyone around him that, _really_ , he was fine; he was perfectly sober. "You can't do anything for a bruise."

Karé, slouched back into the third chair with her arms tightly crossed over her chest, her legs thrust out into their tangle of ankles and boots, rolled her eyes. 

"Bruises don't get all over your shirt," Iolo muttered, stripping open a pack of disinfectant wipes. His hair kept falling into his face, inky-dark, a shade he continually insisted was a cousin to _blue_ ; he shoved it impatiently back into place, and nearly dropped his wipe onto the table.

Poe glanced down at the brownish stains near his collar. "That was just my nose." Which had stopped bleeding on its own before they'd even arrived. "I'm fine."

Karé reached up to snatch away the freezepac, its smooth plastic surface beaded with red. She waved it in Poe's face - just a bruise, indeed - wordless, her mouth clamped stubbornly shut. The pain under her chin was starting to dull, but inside was a different story, and she could taste blood.

"Well," Poe said, before abruptly falling silent. His reaction time was sadly slowed - he didn't manage to jerk back until Iolo had swiped one of those stinging wipes right across his cheekbone. He planted his hand on the table and pushed, as though he were trying to propel himself to the other side of the room. _"Ow!"_

Iolo gave the reddened wipe an exasperated wave. "It doesn't hurt. Sit still. If you'd backed off like this when that druk-for-brains shoved you off your stool, we wouldn't be doing this."

Poe's quiet, amiable facade hardened in a second. His shoulders dropped, his jaw set, and if he hadn't been in a pretty permanent state of wincing, the look (only slightly unfocused) he turned on Iolo might even have been imposing. "No kriffing way. You heard what he -"

"I heard what he said, yes. The whole place heard what he said. No one else listened to him."

It wasn't true. Karé remembered the sudden silence in that clattering tavern - the eyes that had risen to their ever-louder dispute with said druk-for-brains, and the various stares of disapproval, the aggressively supportive applause from a corner or two, the murmurs that had begun to spread from table to table, everyone chiming in with their own whispered opinions. Everyone had heard what he'd said. Everyone had listened. And everyone had had something to say.

They just hadn't said it as loud as Poe, which - no surprise. The three of them lapsed into silence now, though, Poe submitting to his patching-up with a heavy, almost petulant stoicism. Iolo kept at his clumsy but thorough work, a tinge of embarrassment, perhaps, driving him to hurry just a very little. Karé's gaze moved to the window - the same window they all had, same shape, same size, same view of a towering building composed of other, identical windows. It was a sight she knew well, that they all did: the spires of the barracks complex by night, with the glow of Republic City in the distance, its bounding skyline's glitter visible at any hour, light or dark. It looked different, tonight, although nothing had changed. The shapes and angles and colors were the same, but they seemed to present themselves in a new arrangement - as though she had learned, suddenly, how to read the language in which they had always been written. It was a difference she meant to refuse to acknowledge, but, like one of the endless flashing signs in the city's less well-heeled commercial centers, it burrowed into her brain before she could choose whether to understand it. _Finest Corellian-Method Brandy. Shows All Night. Real Potolli Fur, Fake Potolli Prices. Dancing, Dancing, Dancing._

_Senator Organa Is The Blood of Vader._

Today, everyone had heard that, a despicably staged announcement - true though it might have been - from Senator Organa's political enemies, a calculated attack on her legacy from people whose motives should have been transparent to any idiot in any bar on the planet. Karé, like everyone, had felt it. And if her immediate reaction was to get in the face of whatever hateful creep decided it meant that Leia Organa deserved anything but respect - there were those who felt differently. Too many of them. And too many of them, she'd been disturbed and sickened to realize, in uniform.

"It can't be that bad," Poe said, after most of the residual blood had been cleared from his face, leaving only a couple reddened lines across his eyebrow, the top of his cheek. He leaned forward, peering at Karé's tightly sealed lips. "Come on. Let me see."

She shook her head - and, when she caught Iolo shooting her a curious look as he was peeling open a bandage, she waved him back to his work.

Poe shoved the bandage away, leaning toward her. "If you don't show me, I'm calling down to medical." His _I mean business_ expression was already a little soft with fatigue and intoxication, but it caved in entirely to open horror when, at last, she opened her mouth. "Oh, _shit."_

Karé snapped her mouth shut again and tipped her head back to look at the ceiling, her face contracting in pained displeasure at her worst expectations confirmed. "I'm _fine_ ," Poe told Iolo, shoving his hand into the clutter of the medkit to fish around for a pack of pills. "Just give her some pain meds - her tongue's like - man, you must have taken that fall hard. I wondered why you weren't telling him where he could go get his - oh, man." By the time he found the appropriate drugs, Iolo had already gone to fetch a cup from the shelf, and returned; Poe took it, and looked at the contents of his hands before squinting up once more at Karé. "Can you drink?"

She nodded - she snatched the cup and the pill pack from him - and she shoved her chair back and marched into the bathroom, knocking the door most of the way closed behind her with her elbow. In the bright, sunny light shining down from above the mirror, every nick and scrape and spreading bruise leapt up and demanded to be noticed. There was an alarming stain on her sleeve, but it was only wine. She set the cup on the little shelf under the mirror, and turned the tap - and let it run, gripping the sides of the sink and staring down into the dark slit of the drain. Her knuckles were red, too, and half-raw. 

The water was steaming by the time she looked up again, to see Poe pushing the door quietly open. The bottom half of the mirror had fogged over, but their eyes met above the gentle, cloudy line the steam had made. His gaze dropped for a moment to the cup and the still-unopened packet of pills, and then he was behind her, his arms slowly encircling her waist, his mouth settling carefully, carefully against her ear. They were both a mess, of blood and booze and the kinds of things one picked up from the floors of taverns, that were just better not to name; of hurt, and the empty, charred space left behind in the wake of anger. 

"I know it hurts," Poe breathed against her temple. "I'm sorry." There was just enough of his voice in it to raise a comforting vibration in his chest where it pressed against her back, a soothing purr. "I'm sorry." It was a pain she clung to, though - in a foolish, superstitious hope that she could keep some quantity of the universe's finite supply of misery from landing on another woman, not so far away, who must have been in so much agony. Someone they'd all have bled for, happily. Someone she had never met, but whose pain seemed to leap up like a beacon over the bright, sleepless city. Someone whose name was everywhere tonight - being spat on, and picked up again, and thrown, and defended, and cherished, and reviled.

It was Iolo who ripped the pack open, eventually - who slid his hand through Poe's stiff, dark hair; who held the cup of water to Karé's lips to swallow as she grimaced; who guided them all to rest, leaving bandage wrappers and half-empty tubes of antibiotic cream and spent disinfectant wipes on the table. The bed was small, hardly big enough for two, but that hadn't stopped them in some time - even drunk, exhausted, and stinging all over, they fell into their arrangement with only a little stiff-jointed awkwardness. Poe curled on his side, his back jammed against the wall - Iolo stretched out on his back, propped up slightly against the headboard tonight, the better to keep watch - Karé tucked in at his side, her leg thrown over his. Liquor and sweat and the sharp, volatile stench of medicine enveloped them, but the cool, grey light of the faraway city leached away most of their color, erasing, for the moment, the abrasions and new bruises and other external signs of the beating the entire galaxy had taken that day. They were at home, together, and so they slept - almost peacefully - until the red lip of the sun appeared between the base's close-set buildings, and began to creep slowly, slowly toward them across the floor.

* * *

_Resistance Safehouse ; Darropolis, Hosnian Prime ; 34 ABY._

Iolo's sight might have outstripped that of his human colleagues, but his hearing, thankfully, was no stronger; a broader perception of light, of color, and of motion was an asset in a fleet action, but greater aural sensitivity would only have been a pain, for someone whose time was spent in large part sitting stuffed into the cockpit of his X-Wing, listening to the endless crackle and static bursts of comms traffic. Striding down the bright, high-ceilinged corridor of the residence unit in which Poe had signaled their rendezvous would take place, he heard his own footfalls - music emanating from behind a door or two - and nothing of the trees lining the roof, swaying in the wind above the skylight that ran the entire length of the hall. They were lush and silent, making swimming, soothing shadows on the floor, their gentle rustle too distant for humanoid hearing to register.

And so when he stopped in front of the appointed unit, and heard a deep, ostentatious moan followed by Karé's sharp, soaring laugh - it wasn't because of some particular aptitude he possessed.

They were just being loud.

He swiped the key he'd been given, and pressed the panel; the door slid open, and the voices broke off into stifled amusement, whispers and choked-off laughs. He'd been trying, since he'd received Poe's message, to focus on the dangers of this meeting - two highly suspected operatives of the outlawed Resistance, having disappeared from their Defense Fleet assignments, returning to the seat of the government they'd disavowed, meeting with their covert agent who had been stationed behind to relay intelligence - there were more than enough logistical concerns to occupy all of his attention, and that of the lookouts stationed outside. It was better to be filled with the apprehension that came from the risk of being seen than with the intensified longing that had threatened to overtake him at the thought of seeing them again. But that need broke free, now, filling him, igniting a painful warmth in his chest as the door shut behind him and he passed through the sparse kitchen and into the bedroom. How long had it been? Months, only four months, but the thought that he would be with them again in a matter of steps was such a keen delight that it became a physical pang.

And there they were - naked, both of them, entwined with one another on the bed, flushed and grinning. Karé sucked in a theatrical gasp, pressing her hand to her breastbone, _caught_ ; Poe just bit down on his lip and winked at him, a little extra pink suffusing into his face across his nose, a slight variation that Iolo knew so well by now that it might as well have been a verbal greeting. "Right on time," Poe said, his voice breathless and lazy all at once. His hair was a carded-through mess of a crown, his lips gently swollen. Karé's bright blond braid had tilted out of place, less folded in at the back of her head than resting there, ready to tumble free. A warm glow had risen up across her throat, her breast, her nipple, the work of lips and teeth and stubble, and Poe's hand was firmly between her legs, his fingers hidden deep inside of her. His erection was pressed stiff against her side, and the sheen of arousal practically radiated from them, lighting the room for Iolo in a way that showed more to him than the light of any star could do. On a planet like this one - like most, really - where every artificial addition, every construction and ornamental arrangement, had been designed by those who saw a fraction of what he did, things could look so dissonant, so harsh and badly matched. But this was perfect, natural harmony, every tone coordinated, every wavelength aligned, from the complex throb of myriad shades of pleasure-red pulsing along Poe's flank, to the infinity of glistening iridescence in the white of Karé's eye.

He'd missed them, so very, very much.

"Don't stop on my account," he said, not that they'd been about to; he hooked his foot around the leg of a chair sitting in the corner, and dragged it to the side of the bed. 

"Told you he'd be lazy," Poe murmured, dipping his head to close his mouth over the angle of Karé's collarbone. His eyes never left Iolo's, though, and that look, that combination of fondness and challenging enticement, could have been Poe's very own shade of affection. 

Karé tilted her head back to give him a pout - which was rather undercut by the smile that bit into it a moment later as she arched her back, her hips rocking slowly downward. Iolo bent to kiss her, shutting his eyes for just a moment. He felt the pulse in her lips, the desire in the twist of her fingers in his hair - but he knew that if he looked at her, there would be a softness there, a longing that had little enough to do with sex. He wanted to wrap his arms around her and stay, to bury his face in her hair, to lie between them and fall asleep and not have to worry about what might greet them when they woke up. 

But for now - this would do. Pretty nicely, too. He drew back, taking her hand and setting it at the base of Poe's neck.

"We missed you," she said, even as she was curling back toward Poe. "He's so bossy when you're not around - _ah_."

Poe nipped at her earlobe. "What was that, Captain?"

"Nothing, sir," Iolo said, as Karé said _you get really kriffing bossy_ , and wrapped her hand around his cock, and laughed. 

They were putting on a show for him, he knew. The exaggerated movements, sharp angles of legs or backs or tilted faces, the volume at which Karé matched Poe's reliably emphatic vocalizations, the frequent tandem glances in his direction - it was nothing they were trying to hide. But just as happily, he could have watched them sleep. The familiar aura of their mingled bodies would have shone off them just the same, a thrumming core of warmth.

Poe pressed his mouth to Karé's ear, whispering something rough and strained. "Yes," she sighed, and together they shifted, pressing her down onto her back as Poe rolled between her legs. The look on Poe's face then struck him so deeply it seemed to freeze in time, an expression of admiration, gratitude, tenderness so open, so freely and easily given, so precisely familiar and yet so stunning because he hadn't seen it in so long - it hit him then, for the first time, how much he had given up, staying here. What he could have had, every day and every night, if he'd chosen not to stay in the Hosnian system and devote himself and his Dagger Squadron to recruiting (and, call it what it was - spying), but rather returned to the Resistance proper. It was easier not to see it, perhaps - not to be shown so powerfully and at such close range what he missed every morning when he awoke to that grey sliver of time before the sunrise, and lay alone.

Karé gave a moan and hooked her legs around him as Poe slid into her, his hips hitching with the waves of pleasure Iolo could almost, _almost_ see running up his spine. The show fell apart a little at this stage, he was amused to see, their careful attention to him faltering as they rose to heights of arousal that he was beginning to feel mirrored under his own skin, warm and aching. They were fucking with abandon; the muscles stood out in Poe's arm where he propped himself up, his other hand arched between them, the tips of his fingers pressed against her clit. Her head was tipped back, her brow furrowed with want, and her braid had finally lost its mooring, hanging free and beginning to unwind. 

It was time to stop watching. "Hold on," Iolo said, his voice admirably level despite the surge of desire pushing through him. It was when they _stopped_ , though - just like that - that his cock twitched, that he felt himself straining against his pants with undeniable need. Poe was frozen, except for the heaving of his shoulders, looking at him with a pleading incredulity, and Karé was panting and staring at the ceiling with a lift of her eyebrows that very clear said _why me_ \- but they stopped. Iolo stood, jerking his head to the side a bit - _off_ \- and thrilled to watch them disengage, uncomplaining except for a quiet whimper. Before Poe could push himself too far away, Iolo sunk his hand into his hair and tugged, guiding his head down slowly, slowly between Karé's legs. He held him there, suspended, for a moment, reveling in the heft and weight of him in his hand, the shallow, desperate little sounds of his breath.

Karé's hand slid in over his, their fingers tangling together in Poe's hair. "Did I mention," she said, letting her hips squirm once against the bed, "how much I missed you?"

He laughed, and let go. She took over with both hands, and by the warm, wet, gentle sounds and her pleased outpouring of breath, he knew Poe had set to his work (not work he was ever reluctant to perform, to put it mildly). And then he joined them, finally, easing onto the bed beside them, letting his hand run over Karé's knee, along the slope of Poe's back. He hooked one hand under Poe's hip, getting him to hoist himself up on his knees enough that Iolo could reach between his legs to stroke along his cock where it hung heavy, slick and shining. When Poe began to rock his hips into that rhythm, when he shuddered too sharply, Iolo gave him a quick pinch to the inside of his thigh. And then they would start again: Poe refocusing himself on bringing Karé to the edge, trying steadfastly to resist the crest of pleasure he knew Iolo would only draw him back from - and coming charging headlong up to it regardless, only to fall back, and start again, and start again.

But when Karé cried out, and her thighs shook, and her hips were bucking as she mouthed to both of them and no one, _please, yes, yes, yes_ , Iolo worked his slick fingers into Poe's ass, one, two; and he moved in him, firm, persistent strokes, pushing back against the almost electric jolt of Poe's hips. Karé's shoulders slumped back, her fingers in Poe's hair uncurling, falling into shaky, gentle petting, and Poe groaned deep and long against her thigh as he came, clenching tight around Iolo's fingers, as though to keep them there, touching that one, deep, perfect place - as though Iolo would have pulled away, would have missed this sight for any price in the galaxy.

The longer he lingered, the longer he could pretend: he wouldn't find himself alone again tomorrow.

He knew they sensed it, of course - his repressed apprehension, the sadness he was trying to shove back long enough to enjoy the few hours he would have in its absence. It was why they'd both come. It was why they'd greeted him this way. It was why, a few breathless minutes later, Karé was slipping behind him, winding her arms around his chest, her hands pushing past his clothes, speaking low, soothing things into his ear as Poe divested him of his boots, his belt. _We miss you. I love you. We think about you so much. I miss you. We love you._ It was a sound like water, so natural as to be restful even in its bright, broken cadence, and he eased back into it, his head dropping onto her shoulder as Poe's mouth closed around his cock and the world behind his eyelids turned to sparking, all-consuming gold.

And when they were finally lying quietly together, he did his best to fall asleep, or at least to doze off, just for a moment, so he could have the pleasure of waking up with them just once. He wanted to open his eyes and find Poe's face buried in his shoulder, Karé's hand stretched out on his sternum. But sleep wouldn't come for him - although he pretended, when he felt Poe move to prop himself up on his elbow, that he was far away in a dream somewhere, some place in which he wouldn't have to hear what Commander Dameron was about to say.

"We have names for you," Poe said, quietly, but with none of the tentativeness that might have hinted he thought Iolo was anything but wide awake. "Five, this time. It'll take a few weeks - you'll see, when I read you in. It'll take a few weeks, but I don't think it's a complicated operation. For you, it'll be no problem." Iolo was careful, so careful, to keep his face perfectly still, as blank as if he'd heard nothing at all, but there were things Poe saw, too, that should have been invisible to other men - he might have been, like most humans, all but colorblind, but he had the uncanny and unfailing ability to see right through someone's ribs. His finger settled on Iolo's lips. "I know. But it's just one more." Iolo felt Poe grin, somehow, as his heart leapt in his chest. "It's just one more, and then we're bringing you home."

* * *

_Hosnian Debris Field ; 34 ABY._

_Just one more_ , Poe told himself, his focus wire-taut on the screen before him - as, in the corner of the viewport, a lazily spinning speck of an asteroid made its appearance. _Just one more._

It was a lie - one he told himself to keep his exhausted mind clamped as tightly as possible around the thousand shifting aspects of their approach into the remains of the Hosnian system, all of them threatening to fly away from him at once. The countless disturbances their sensors had picked up, blinking a dim red on the nav readout, made a grim picture of the next hour, at least. Everywhere, there were things that didn't belong, that came out of nowhere. Rock. Ice. Tangled hulks of wreckage. Things he preferred to forget he'd seen at all - things he would have tried to convince himself were figments of his imagination, if he'd had the time. 

And then, where there _should_ have been something - nothing. Hosnian Prime was gone.

 _Just like that_.

That slowly spinning asteroid drew nearer, and as it approached it became clear it was in fact hurtling with fatal speed; the speck grew and grew until, as it barrelled by no more than a few kilometers in front of them, it was a little like watching the Senate building roll down the street, the kind of mass that seemed as though it shouldn't have been able simply to drift. These were easier to duck, though. It was the little ones, the pieces of rock and slag and stars knew what else that more approximated the size of their shuttle, that were the real dangers. They could spin up on you out of nowhere. One hit, and he and Karé would be another drop in the Hosnian bucket. Two more lives - what could they possibly matter?

Here, at least, he found some relief - as he had in the sky over Takodana, in the space around _Starkiller_ \- from the strange, residual shadow that seemed to cling in the untraveled corners of his mind. That sticky darkness had been steadily diminishing, and he wondered, in the split second between rolling away from one rock and swooping under another, whether he would come out the other side of this and find it gone entirely. It had been days since he'd left the _Finalizer._ Surely, soon -

"Poe." Karé's voice was even, but almost brittle in its control. 

"I see it." _Focus. Just one more._

It was fifty more - a hundred - three hundred - before finally they were through this band of the newly formed asteroid field, and out the other side. The shuttle's constant proximity alarms became less frequent, and ultimately silenced. They ran a status check - not great, across the board, but it would do, the shields hadn't suffered any irreversible damage, not yet - and brought the other systems back online. The navcomp was confused, and fair enough; Karé muttered and jabbed at it until it accepted their coordinates, never mind the disappearance of an entire system. Comms were next; and they both held their breath, as the receiver swept through its frequencies, waiting for a hail, some chatter, a beacon -

The familiar, staid voice of a Defense Fleet distress transmission crackled through, and Karé about took her seat out of the deck trying to leap to her feet, the incredulous beginning of a grin breaking through her pallor. Poe was laughing, _could it be this easy_ , and one glorious, dim red spot appeared on the screen, the beacon's position triangulated, not quite where they'd expected it, but he'd fucking _take it_ -

And then another spot appeared; another. Four more. Eight. The comms receiver kept sweeping through its frequencies, and that voice kept sputtering through, broken and disjointed, jumping in and leaping off in the middle of words as the receiver struggled with the load of transmission after transmission, emergency hail after emergency hail, half a fleet's worth of automated distress signals pouring out into empty space, signals designed to survive even catastrophic damage. In another five seconds, the screen was red, red everywhere - a solid plane of urgent, blinking beacons, most of them likely marking nothing but frozen graves. 

Karé slammed her foot into the underside of the console, and put her head in her hands, and cried.

They'd been so close - so close to having him home. Dagger Squadron had been days away from wrapping their operation. Iolo _should_ have been back on base in time to greet him when he made his heroic if rather dusty return from Jakku ( _I wish he were here_ , Karé had said, gazing with fierce displeasure at his constellation of bruises, _so he could help me chain you up in the infirmary_ ). Iolo and his squadron would have made a difference, in the assault on _Starkiller_. The loss of life might not have been quite so much. And they could all have jumped back together to D'Qar, to mourn their friends and begin to face the chasm of loss that was the Hosnian system, the three of them, who had met there, who had lived there, who had loved each other there so recently. It was an insurmountable loss, but with Karé and Iolo, it wouldn't have been total.

Without Iolo, Poe felt like a moon suddenly dropping towards the sun, its gravitational strings cut, its counterbalance gone. He gripped Karé's hand, and their arms hung there between their seats for what felt like hours, and they struggled silently together, to find some orbit - some balance they could hold with only two. It was nothing they hadn't managed before, he thought, gazing out at the second band of debris, lit pink by the sun at their backs, the one remaining body in this system, its light muted and bloodied by dust. They'd all done without each other at one time or another, sometimes for months on end. But hope made all the difference, didn't it? No one was truly gone, when there was a chance they might return.

And there was a chance. Iolo hadn't been in touch since the cataclysm here, but it didn't mean he was gone. There were countless ways in which he could have been silenced or incapacitated, trapped in this destruction, where travel and communications both were full of the potential for disastrous interference. _We have to wait here_ , he decided, _at least until -_

"We have to wait here," Karé said, her face drawn and grey and grave, but determined. "This was our crisis rendezvous. It could take him days to get here, with all this junk. Even if he'd started before they -" Her voice broke off; she swallowed. "We have to wait."

Poe squeezed her hand, and nodded. The new Hosnian system drifted around them in its chaotic disarray; occasionally, he thought he saw the first sign of some pattern that would inevitably emerge, the arrangement of matter around the irresistible pull of the star. But it was difficult to say - it might only have been his imagination. They sent out a hailing, every half a minute. There was nothing to lose - no one to hide from, here in the waste.

It was three standard days later that they picked up what might have been a response. Three standard days of sitting, watching, eating and sleeping both in these damned chairs, because the last thing they needed was to be up and out of harnesses when their shuttle finally got clipped by a wayward rock. Three days of wearing thin - and barely speaking, which was, for them, beyond an oddity. Three days, until on the vast, almost imperceptibly curved tide of scraps and dead things, something that looked like the jagged, broken off aft quarter of a Starhawk entered their field of view, and an alert rose up on the console: _transmission receiving._

Poe didn't notice it, at first; his chin was in his hand, his eyes half-lidded as he stared out of the cockpit. Karé stirred, reaching toward the console, halting and slow; she selected the frequency, and a wave of static washed through the space around them. It was cut with something soft and intermittent, little more than a whisper - but it was there.

_– ger one. This –_

Poe straightened. Karé's eyes were shut, her mouth clamped flat, as though she couldn't bear to think that _maybe_ -

_– copy. This is Dagger –_

The voice was unrecognizable, distorted as it was. But he knew, as his let his head drop back against his seat, a tremor of relief pushing through him: it was Iolo. He shot forward to press _transmit_. "Dagger One, this is - what's this damn bucket called, again, I can't even -"

"We're here," Karé blurted out, leaning forward, gripping the arms of her chair like she was about to launch herself right into space. Her voice was oddly high, and strained all but to breaking. "We're here. It's us."

Silence; another burst of static, this time full of something that might have been laughter. More than one voice. Poe strained to pick up every mangled syllable. 

_Copy, Bucket - didn't think – coordinates still – another week. How did – find us?_

Poe grinned. "We just showed set up camp, Dagger One, and figured you'd show up. That is one ugly hunk of junk you're flying."

_– call her a hunk of junk. This – sealed off, three bays – been tight, but we routed one of the – thrusters from a starfighter, if you can believe it –_

"Dagger One," Karé interrupted, "it sounds like you're trying to regale us with your no doubt thrilling tale of engineering genius, but you're breaking up, and I _know_ you're going to want to tell this again anyway." She glanced over at Poe; he nodded, already powering up. "Why don't we save this for a face to face."

"Captain Kun's got it right," Poe added. "Prepare for - boarding." _I guess._ How they were going to manage this, he wasn't sure, but between the three of them, they'd figure it out. They'd come this far. A little vacuum wasn't going to stop them now. "You got your guys, Dagger One?"

_– ffirmative. Four of them. Repeat, four. Affirm –_

Poe whistled, low. "Four," he murmured to Karé. "That'll be a tight trip home."

She laughed. _"Good."_

And he couldn't disagree, really. The thought of shoving in three to a bunk on the jump away from this nightmare was more appealing than anything ever had been. As he started his careful, rolling approach to Iolo's drifting half-ship, pitching toward the cloudy glow of this system's deserted sun, as he took them sailing across what space remained between them until he could adjust course to hang alongside their target like a satellite settling in for the long, long haul - there was nothing he wanted more than to press up against the gently thrumming bulkhead in the cabin, and drape himself out across Iolo's solid weight, and feel Karé's breath on his arm where it lay between them. Their home might have fallen away from under them, crushed to nothing, but they would fly away, and find a different ground to walk on - or none at all. They needed no world but each other; entire planets had been left in ruins, but here they were, circling one another nonetheless, in the light of the same star that had warmed their first meeting - set on their first, heady, perfect night - and risen over their first flushed and startled morning, which Poe remembered as though it had been _this_ morning, and cherished as much as though it might be tomorrow.


End file.
